Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century ed. by David Cantor, Edmund Ramsden (review)

Since the invention of PTSD in 1980, “trauma” has become an increasingly dominant subject of study across the humanities. Yet the term can all too easily be use imprecisely or anachronistically when investigating past emotions. David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden’s collection of papers on Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century intersects with earlier studies, especially Paul Lerner and Mark Micale’s Traumatic Pasts (2001),¹ yet opens out differently the ways in which we can approach the history of emotions, as well as medical understandings of twentieth-century feeling through the category of “stress.” In doing so the editors and contributors enrich not only our knowledge, but also the ways in which we can conceptualize and investigate emotions in the past.

The focus on stress, shock, and adaptation encompasses a range of emotional responses that can be sudden or cumulative, politicized or unacknowledged, of interest to the military, work managers, and social reformers. Furthermore, it incorporates such varied states as depression, fear, and sadness. This wider set of emotional categories is complemented in the collection by a tight historical focus on the critical period around and after the Second World War, though the promise of a fuller “twentieth-century” survey is fulfilled by carefully selected forays from the later nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries.

Among the authors are historians of health sciences, specialists in medical humanities, as well as researchers in social or medical anthropology. Their range of subjects includes some relatively detailed and specialized developments such as Joseph Melling on occupational strain, or David Cantor on 1950s thinking about stress in cancer patients. There are also wider case studies with methodological or political implications: Tulley Long’s piece on early Cold War military stress research, for instance, or Junko Kitanaka’s essay on the emergence of work-related stress and depression in contemporary Japan.

This combination of specialization and breadth makes visible a rich, varied landscape of historical meanings and interpretations beginning with two essays that describe the scientific and social rise of the stress concept. Hans Selye’s work and career crop up throughout the collection, not least in Mark Jackson’s assessment. One of the book’s main achievements is its cumulative exploration of how Selye’s ideas evolved, gained popular and scientific influence, and were eventually overtaken in various fields. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, for example, describes the popularization of stress in 1950s America, including its association with masculine identity.

Selye’s work, and the resonance of stress as a sociomedical category, it turns out, was facilitated by a “democratization” process during the Second World War following on from Grinker and Spiegel’s Men Under Stress (1945).² The effect of this account, which can stand for a wider shift, was the move away from hereditary and constitutional explanations of “combat fatigue” toward the idea of a universal “breaking point.” Theodore Brown, in his essay on post–World War II U.S. military psychiatry, shows how the implications of this shift played out following 1945.

Charles Rosenberg’s proposal to understand the discovery of diseases as a “framing device” “by which a domain of knowledge and expertise is assembled around perceived causal relationships in nature” (p. 190) animates many of these essays. Robert G. W. Kirk’s consideration of how concept of stress in animals allowed an ethical reconsideration of the natural world, for example, is complemented by Edmund Ramsden and Rhodri Hayward’s discussions of urban mental health and depression in the United States and United Kingdom. The editors’ intention to trace shifting concepts of the self in relation to the social world, surrounding environment, and developing “modernity,” and to place these developments within wider historical settings, is perhaps most fully realized in two remarkable essays: Allan Young’s discussion of post-9/11 “resilience” and Otniel E. Dror’s work on sudden...